


up the winding stair

by Victoryindeath2



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [105]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angband, Angst, Gold Rush AU, Maedhros does not love the things Morgoth loves, Maedhros loves his family very much, Morgoth is both highly intelligent and incredibly dumb, Morgoth is the worst, Morgoth loves science, Morgoth shares his special interests with his most special interest, Psychological Torture, Torture, another canon character makes a surprise appearance, can the villains please stop touching Maedhros I cry as I post this fic, his flesh is healing but his soul? not so much, i said what i said, it's been a week since Morgoth and Mairon attended a feverish bleeding Mae, missing scene for within the hollow crown between ch 5 and 6, not gonna tag anything else don't be mad, set about a week after the fic the unquiet grave, so is Murphy he needs to die, some horror but mostly just sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 10:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21444985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: The guards do not take Maedhros to the infirmary."Open your hand, Maitimo."
Relationships: Fëanor | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Maedhros | Maitimo & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Maedhros | Maitimo & Nerdanel, Maedhros | Maitimo & Sons of Fëanor, Rumil & Maedhros | Maitimo
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [105]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	up the winding stair

_Cold little hands tugging at your wrist. _

_A whisper. _

_“Come, Mae, come and thee the thnow.”_

_You’re home again—_home_, you whisper in silver-moon wonder, in the glide of Maglor’s bow across the second string from the right. In the soft silence of white dusting under your feet, and the ice between your toes doesn’t matter because if you slit your eyes just a little you will see a candle in the window, or perhaps your mother’s gleaming hair, and if you are very, very quiet, and keep very, very still, you might be able to pretend this is your future not your past sticking in your skin like, like darts_

_See now you brought _him_ into it, you brought him here where everything was pure (excepting you) and now you are still because maybe he’ll think you’re dead and he’ll just bury you and you won’t have to take Mairon’s long relentless hands and pierce your belly with his nails _

“You will be grateful, in time, for pain.” 

_Will you?_

“Eat.”

_You have no more brothers, no more breath, no more bile, so why must they kick you? _

_No._

_You aren’t home, though someone _is_ driving their boot against your ribs. Wake up—or don’t._

Maedhros’s blanket (shield, guilt, Galway) is gone, wrenched from his grasping fingers, and he moans, lifts crusted lashes, and stares at the blurred stone beneath him—just so a nameless boy long ago used to wriggle, squirm, lie flat on his stomach at the edge of a duck pond, waiting for ripples to smooth away—only nothing will ever be smooth again.

Not stone water skin it’s all _ruined_.

He cannot tell if his shivering is from the chill or from the dreams he must smother.

(only dreams, because there is no past anymore, and time means nothing in hell, and everything)

Curling in on himself, Maedhros is almost grateful for the width and unity of each of his wrist shackles. They do not pulse with blood, and now that he is fully conscious, he cannot imagine them parting into five tiny fingers. The lisping voice has faded away.

Good. That’s good. If it had remained, he might have guessed to whom it belonged.

“Up.”

Two rough hands cut between Maedhros’s torso and his arms, hoisting him to his feet, and the pain is not _white_ hot anymore, nor does it send him hurtling into oil-black night, but tattered skin tears underneath bandages and he _tears_, gasping deeply. His back is not fully healed (will never heal). It still burns like snake venom when touched, and even when left alone.

The brine, and whatever the man in the infirmary puts on him—that is how acid must sting.

Sharp-burning acid, and yet if Maedhros could choose, he might hope his current destination is the infirmary again. In that cold, compassionless place, dark hair and white face will not loom. A voice will not incise his soul, hard fingers will not dig their way into bleeding wounds.

Maedhros will not be—comforted. 

Not now. Not again. Not ever oh _God_.

(_poor boy_, Morgoth called him, and held him close with vile gentleness as though he were a child)

(Maedhros wept like a child)

“Here.”

A second guard, the one called Murphy, steps into the cell and shoves rough trousers at Maedhros. He takes them and holds them stupidly. They seem over-large.

“I’d be damned grateful if I were you, boy,” Murphy says. He cannot be _very_ many years older than Maedhros, but Maedhros is the one standing weaponless, near naked, with shorn head and shorn courage. “If you don’t put ‘em on in the next thirty seconds, I can tell the Master you turned down his gift.” 

Gift? No comfort in this place has been offered unless it were accompanied by questions, mockery, and cruel touch.

Maedhros shivers, this time for the ghost of fingers working their path through the remains of his hair, trailing down and marking his cheeks in ways only Maedhros knows (though surely anyone could see the scarlet traces of shame against his blood-stolen skin because—_there_ is the press of Morgoth’s thumb, sticking in whiskey and Maedhros’s tears, and _there_ is where Mairon clamped—)

The trousers are rough under his fingers. Maedhros, bending and stepping into them, staggers just a bit and reaches out unthinking to steady himself by touching the first guard’s arm.

The guard pulls away, and Maedhros falls hard on his knees.

(never at the right time never in the right place never far enough)

It takes both guards, this time, to wrench him to his feet, and then the trousers are in place (if too loose) and the cuffs slip over new shackles around his ankles. Tethers in place also.

He should be used to the weight of the chains by now, just as he has become accustomed to the reek of Morgoth’s kindness.

Maedhros licks his cracked, splitting lips, almost tasting the whiskey that spattered there days ago. He shudders involuntarily, and Murphy shoves him toward the door.

“Careful,” the other guard says. “You’ll get in trouble again.”

Murphy struck Maedhros on the face, once, and he walks with a limp now.

“Don’t care,” Murphy says, but his fingers do not dig into Maedhros’s arm quite so deeply.

It really makes no difference.

The guards do not take Maedhros to the infirmary.

A long time ago, Maedhros used to go without shoes more often than he was shod, and his feet cheerfully suffered the summer burn of dirt paths, the pricks of thistles and stingers, and the indentations of tiny stones in the orchard stream. That was then.

Now, he is exhausted, wrung out, and his thin blood runs thinner. Holding his trousers above his hips, he trips up a twisting stair, desperately trying not to rely on his guards for support, and his feet scrape the uneven stone painfully. From time to time Murphy pushes at his defenseless back, and Maedhros lurches forward, moaning like a dying buck with an arrow through its throat.

If they could just leave him alone long enough to prepare himself, if they could for one miserable day let him wake up and collect his shattered courage before dragging him off to Morgoth or Mairon—oh _fuck_ he is—stop—think—can he remember if this is the hall to Mairon’s forge? When he last visited, he came unconscious, and left not much better.

He shouldn’t shrink from these thoughts—this is what he wants, the only desire left in a heap of ashes. He’s considered and sharpened the filthy black steel of the words he might use, but he does not know if he is strong enough to wield them. This too, he must first put his affairs in order. He almost laughs at the turn of legal phrase.

Once, he had considered the law. Now the only law is that he must suffer until he die.

Maedhros stumbles just once down another dark hallway, passing by two open rooms in various states of birth, wood and nails and stone strewn everywhere. Ghostly men in leather aprons stop their hammers and chisels, and in the space of this silence, they stare at him hungrily. Stare until their taskmaster cracks his voice across their backs like a whip.

Maedhros breathes too quickly, tenses the mutilated skin over his shoulder-blades, and is grateful for the trousers at last. 

There was so much blood tracking down his legs that day, pooling on the floor, streaking Mairon’s face.

He can’t have much left.

Chipping and clanging resume, and the rooms are gone, and Maedhros has no time to pull apart his tangled guts to see if any of the threads quiver shamefully at the idea that anyone new might have glimpsed the scars netting his back. One of the guards—Murphy no doubt—shoves the heel of his palm into the base of Maedhros’s skull, snapping it forward. 

The dark glitters in scattered gunshot, and Maedhros bites the insides of his cheeks because he needs to _focus_, if he is going to Mairon, but the missing-ness of his lost tooth reminds him of all the sadistic play the hunter can and will perform in ghoulish glee before he kills his prey, and it is impossible in this moment for Maedhros to name and farewell _all_ he lost and threw away—

Just when Maedhros is about to collapse from weariness, Murphy jerks him to a stop in front of a tall black door.

The other guard knocks.

Nothing happens.

“You sure he said the conservatory?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Murphy snarls. “Said something like he wanted to show off his collection to his pet.”

Maedhros bends over so suddenly he nearly pitches face first into the stone flooring. Of course. Beneath the stutter of his heart, he knew who had summoned him, and now worms writhe in his gut.

_“You are not my prisoner, you are my prize.”_

(a prize, a pet, a _thing _with no soul and no purpose apart from its owner’s delight, a _thing_ which you would hold when it is dying, feed and water though it whines and scrabbles away from your touch, stroke gently with hand and speech alike, and exclaim loudly over when it leaps up, trots by your feet, licks your hand)

Maedhros dry-heaves again, and both guards grunt and pull at his shaking shoulders, pull him up-right.

Murphy twists Maedhros’s chains, drawing him near, and then he grabs his jaw, digging his thumb into a spot of saliva just under Maedhros’s patchwork lips.

Maedhros cannot help the whimper that escapes him.

Murphy narrows his eyes and breathes out tobacco stink in a puff of anger.

“None of that now,” he says, and Maedhros, who once could have flipped this hornet-faced Irishman on the ground without misplacing a single hair tucked behind his ear—Maedhros can only think of the storm-born everlasting nightmare who awaits him, and he blinks his eyes closed and clenches his stomach so it is as still as his lungs.

Murphy turns away, muttering. “What a god-damned coward.”

Even as he speaks and Maedhros sways_, _the black door swings open and is replaced by a towering silhouette, a darkness horridly whole and breathing, breathing in sharply with the gasp of a child receiving a new toy, except Maedhros isn’t new at all.

Once, Maedhros’s heart thrilled to bring delight to others.

“Maitimo,” the devil says, “follow me.”

Morgoth’s conservatory has floorboards that are warm under Maedhros’s sensitive feet. Unnaturally warm. He stares at them, because he cannot look up yet, because Morgoth is ahead of him and Murphy is behind, and it’s a hell of a world where Maedhros would prefer the endless company of the latter.

“You look quite well, lad,” Morgoth says softly, his words running over Maedhros’s shoulders like—like Thuringwethil’s fingers once did, caressing and digging all at once, and Maedhros inhales sharply, because his skin is overlaid, cut upon cut, and Morgoth enjoys plucking delicately at exposed nerves.

Maedhros should look up before he is commanded. Instead, he clutches at his trousers’ excess waistline with one hand, twisting it as though it were his own neck. He is in no danger of freezing in this room—it is warm and humid, stifling even, and the thickness of the air is only compounded by the stinging scent of pine branches snapped and needles crumbled.

If the study is Morgoth’s place of business, this must be the womb that birthed him.

There is a knot in the dark wood of the board just under Maedhros’s feet, and he covers the gouge at the center of the circle as if doing so will stifle the dog whine threatening to leap up his throat.

Morgoth has not even touched him yet.

He will.

Morgoth always—scrapes his skin—sheds himself like a snake over Maedhros, and somehow he is never peeled to nothing but Maedhros suffocates, buried in layers of deadness.

“I am gladdened to see you upright, my boy,” Morgoth says. “Last I beheld you, you were weak as an infant, and scarcely more verbose. Today, we will have the civilized conversation you promised me.” Wood creaks under his boot, but he does not approach Maedhros. There is a rustling, a clinking of glass.

Maedhros does not remember promising anything. It doesn’t mean he did not bargain though, did not wake to find himself still held and hushed in Morgoth’s pallid, beringed hands, and then beg to be left alone, dropped to the stone cell floor, abandoned with his cheek fallen in his own stinking vomit.

“I will tell you nothing.”

Glass shatters, and a thought splinters Maedhros’s brain: he spoke what he wishes, not what he believes.

He waits for a cold sneer, for a taut word, for a blow across the cheek.

“You asking for more acquaintance with the whip? Maybe across that girlish face of yours?”

When Murphy speaks, Maedhros jerks his gaze up. Morgoth stands ten feet from him, next to a long yellow table set against a rock wall, flanked by tall shelves burdened with jars of all shapes and sizes. A tall stool sits to one side.

Maedhros does not have the time or concentration to take in much more than this, or the vague realization that vines wind up the shelves and stretch out onto iron grates lining the rest of the large room. That plants of varying greens and hideous blossoms rise of out of copper planters like corpses reaching out of graves.

Gas lamps are—nailed—screwed—something—into three walls of the conservatory. In their light, Morgoth’s eyes sink deeper and darker than ever.

He is not pleased.

“Out.”

The door swings open and shuts behind Maedhros, and he is alone with his fear.

(Maedhros has always been afraid. Once, this was a secret only he knew.)

Morgoth’s suit today is impeccable in the sharpness of its creases, but the buttons pull just a little tight across the waist. Foolishly, Maedhros notices this. Wisely, perhaps, he trains his eyes on the shining black circles and pretends he does not watch Morgoth pull on thick gloves and brush tiny glass shards into his palm.

“Maitimo,” Morgoth says, his voice falling like that of a tired parent, one weary with the chastisement of a wild son.

_(No. No. One did not speak so softly. The other did not chastise. One never knew, and the other knows no more, and _hell_ you have to stop)_

“Open your hand, Maitimo.”

Maedhros flinches, then steels himself, because Morgoth stands in front of him now, reaching out, and here is where the pain will begin.

Morgoth waits only a moment. “You are a Feanorian, lad, but as you are also a former gentleman, I hoped you had some manner of courtesy in you yet. Am I wrong?”

He steps nearer, sets his right boot so that Maedhros can feel the hard sole pressed against his smallest toe, and all it would take would be a lift and a swivel or abrupt kick, and some bone or other would be broken.

Maedhros leans a hairbreadth away from Morgoth’s slow-growing smile and opens his hand reluctantly, as eagerly as he would if Morgoth had promised to drop a spider there.

A spider would be less cruel, however, than the glass that snows from Morgoth’s glove. Tiny crystals and shards up to an inch long glitter in Maedhros’s palm, and then—then Morgoth clutches Maedhros’s wrist, and holds his monstrous long fingers over Maedhros’s. One of these brushes the tender, still raw flesh where Mairon took a nail.

Maedhros tugs away, a useless reflex, for he is only a whelp cowering before a silky panther. He waits then, breathless and frozen, waits for Morgoth to crush his skin into the glass, the glass into his skin, and he can’t help but shake for the thought of pierced lines, sliced nerves.

_(The other you, the you that does not exist, has suffered almost like this before, with a ruined carafe, and you pretended your grip was too strong, that you were clumsy, and not drunk as a sailor, lonely as a sailor’s wife, and you cried silently as you pulled each brilliant flake from your hand._

_You were such a fool.)_

Maedhros knows he is a fool, and yet he is still taken aback when Morgoth releases his wrist, sets a hand on his shoulder (tapping the back of his neck one, two, one, two), and says, very pleasantly: “Have you an affection for butterflies?”

(Does Maedhros love butterflies? Did he once love starlight and wind whistling through waving grass, did he suck in his breath at autumn leaves dashing to the ground while grey-green clouds swept down from mountains far away and rolled over the land and home he cannot bear to remember? Did he love rings and smiles and the arch of his horse’s neck?)

Black and orange, black and yellow, midnight blue and ebony dark, wine red rimmed with pale sun and spotted sky—Maedhros has always loved butterflies and their deeply gorgeous, stained-glass garments.

Morgoth guides him, turns him to face the wall he has had his back to, and all of this, he sees.

There is the door and on either side of it are thatched brown screens, and on the screens, sheering off in arcs and waves of scattered escape, butterflies hang dimmed and drained of life and vibrancy.

Maedhros steps nearer, not through any wish of his own, but to disguise how he shrinks away from Morgoth’s fingers, which have fallen from his shoulder and now pull and pry at his bandages.

“What do you think?” Morgoth asks. He has removed his gloves, and now he tears at cloth, tears it away from Maedhros, and it parts from his skin reluctantly, sticking in countless places.

_This close, you can see the tiny pins, the haunted insect eyes, and your heart breaks because you, too, know what it means to be transfixed, your limbs spread wide._

“There are so many.” Maedhros forces himself to speak evenly. He, less than a prisoner, cannot compliment what now seems only barbarity. These flightless souls may have their wings still, but they are no less dead than Morgoth’s eagles.

Souls.

Morgoth has pinned one white butterfly amid the array of color. Its wings are snowy but for twin charcoal dots.

“Your wounds have healed as well as may be expected,” Morgoth says, “but what is this, something has caught your eye?” He leans forward, leans over Maedhros’s shoulder, so that his breath scrapes hot against Maedhros’s cheek, but Maedhros cannot look away from the overlarge needle piercing the white butterfly’s thorax.

“_Pieris rapae_,” Morgoth says softly. “Perhaps you think I have done a great crime, lad, adding it to my collection. I have heard of the old Irish beliefs. Indeed, it was even a law once, that one could not kill white butterflies, seeing as they held the souls of departed children.”

Morgoth’s hand closes once again around the back of Maedhros’s neck, one finger resting over his pulse, and a week ago Maedhros would have screamed and cried and _fought_—would have, did—but Morgoth wants that again, wants to twist him and to hurt him and to laugh at his anguish.

_Don’t give him pleasure._

Maedhros can see nothing anymore except for one nightmare image, a muddy cliffside, and halfway down a limp body nailed to it by a tree branch through the chest, and dead copper hair dripping water and blood.

_Regrettable, Morgoth would say. Beautiful, Mairon would counter. _

_You _must_ get to Mairon._

The glass in Maedhros’s hand cuts easily into his skin as he clenches his fists closed. Morgoth glides in front of him and squeezes his wrist so that Maedhros must drop the shards to the floor.

“There, there, lad, don’t ruin your hand for the sake of what is dead and gone.” Morgoth speaks soothingly, picking glass from Maedhros’s palm.

Maedhros’s lip is bleeding. Again.

The man wearing Athair’s ring rubs Maedhros’s arms up and down from elbow to shoulder.

Maedhros does not move, not at all, because if he flinched in the slightest, he would be tempted to throw himself to the ground, to fumble about for a piece of glass just long enough to—

With his luck, he would manage only to scar himself horribly before Morgoth Bauglir wrenched death from his sight.

A minute passes, and Maedhros’s jaw throbs dully as he bites his teeth together and stares at the black silk banded fashionably about his captor’s neck.

At last, Morgoth ceases his ministrations and brushes the bits of glass to the side with a boot. He calmly retrieves Maedhros’s bandage fallen to the floor and pats the scarlet away from Maedhros’s hand.

The air is so very thick.

“Come, Maitimo,” Morgoth says at last. “I did not mean for this to be an unpleasant visit. Had I intended otherwise, I would have had you brought to my study, where I could have had you strapped down. But that is, I think, an embarrassment neither of us desires.”

Morgoth folds the bandages and walks away, leaving Maedhros free as he can be, which is hardly at all, burdened as he is by his heavy chains.

There will be another attack, but of what sort, Maedhros cannot guess. He cannot prepare.

“I have the same questions for you as always,” Morgoth says, stepping towards a small cabinet crushed between two jar-cluttered shelves, “but this is my sanctum, and we must be civilized here. I cannot have you stand half-naked like a savage, though Feanor and all his let have proven little more than instinct-driven beasts.”

Morgoth hitches open the cabinet door and draws from it folded linen. He shakes the thing out, revealing it to be a shirt, stained yellow at the tattered cuffs.

“I wear this when I am preserving my creatures,” Morgoth says, waving a hand at the shelves behind him.

Maedhros looks closer, and wishes he hadn’t. The jars are clear glass, most filled with liquids golden and sickly brown, and in each jar is some horrid dead thing. In one, a massive black scorpion rests its head and claws on the bottom of the jar, and its tail rises, pushes against the sealed lid, and curls back upon itself. In another, a sand-pale lizard floats vertical. There is a slit an inch long down its belly. Its mouth hangs open.

“A little off-putting, isn’t it?” Morgoth’s smile is far too cheerful. “But then, I have made an art of finding the beauty in repulsive, oft broken things. I must, else I could not keep _you_ around.”

Maedhros flushes. “Or Mairon,” he replies, and by some last shred of grace his voice does not shake.

Morgoth, however, seems more amused than angered. “Yes, yes, there is something wrong with that one’s head. Nevertheless, he has a purpose—but we need not speak of what you already know. We should instead hold conversation about what _I_ do not know.”

Approaching Maedhros, Morgoth flicks the shirt about his shoulders as though it were a short cape. The sleeves hang loose. Morgoth stands in front of Maedhros and pulls the shirt closed about the neck, slipping the first two buttons through their holes.

The smile on Morgoth’s face does not waver as he pats Maedhros’s chest.

“You must forgive me for not dressing you properly, Maitimo. I fear I sent Murphy off with the key to your restraints.”

The shirt bears the hated scent of pine as well, but it is sharper, chemical.

_Formaldehyde, you think you know, you think you remember. So described a black-haired cousin long ago, somewhere in the offstage of whatever your life once was._

Morgoth continues to speak, to ride roughshod over Maedhros’s thoughts, as he always does.

“Strange how you shiver even here. I have heated water piped under the floor, so that my plants and specimens, living and dead, may thrive in an atmosphere best suited for them. Gothmog did not think it could work, but he is the builder, not the architect.

Morgoth links an arm through Maedhros’s and pulls him along closer to the shelves.

Maedhros’s chains clink somberly. Looking away from the man ordering the last days of his life, his eyes stray to the shadowy corner far to the left of the room, where a forest of leafy vines hang from the ceiling, twisting round and round, before ending in a mass of darkness on the floor.

“Tell me, Maitimo, who designed Mithrim? Was it your father? Or the slave?”

Maedhros thinks of darts sticking in his chest, pushed into his eyes, and he bites his lips hard. Morgoth is asking for more than he says, is asking for the truth of who among the living knows where the entrance to the diamond mine is. They’ve been here before.

“Who do you mean?”

(If Maedhros is a wretched fool, let him be obstinate as well. Just until he can die.)

Morgoth does not answer, and his expression is serene like a winter river—icy, frozen almost all through, but for some current deep within. He takes Maedhros’s hand, pinioning Maedhros’s slender fingers so they cross each other, and at the same time he presses his back so that Maedhros steps forward one last time.

The yellow table is to the side, and there lie a tiny knife and a few needles and pins, a board with curious stains on it, and a large bottle stoppered with a cork.

All this is too far away to matter, but directly in front of Maedhros are two jars with coiled snakes, one pale green, and one an ugly cobblestone. Behind these is a wide flattish jar, and inside the most horrid spider Maedhros has ever seen, one with too many grey banded legs and just as many eyes.

Maedhros shudders at the size of the thing, a good six inches across, but Morgoth does not seem to notice his discomfort.

Instead, he puppeteers Maedhros, forcing him to reach out to a strange fern growing out of a planter next to the corpses, reaching up with outstretched branches. The instant Maedhros’s fingertips brush the plant, the fern’s leaves fold up, and Maedhros draws back, startled.

“See, boy,” Morgoth says, his voice quietly even in Maedhros’s ear. “This plant has better instincts than you. Do not test me, lest you end up as nameless as the thrall you are so stupidly desperate to protect.”

_They ride side by side, not to the bridge, not to the lake, but rather to the farthest fields of Mithrim. There is good earth, for grazing or for planting, but Maedhros cannot bring himself to discuss it. _

_He is waiting, waiting to find out why Rumil has asked for his company on this dewy morning ride. The sun is not yet visible, but pale pink spills across the sky._

_“We are not friends as your father and I were,” Rumil says, breaking silence at last, “but I have watched you these last few months. You throw your strength where it is required, with no complaint. You would rather take more work for yourself than burden one who is weary.”_

_In the pause that follows, Maedhros does not remark upon Rumil’s slip of the tongue. _

_The ex-thrall continues. “Your man Galway speaks little but loyally. For this, and for the testimony of my own eyes—”_

_Rumil’s dark face is very solemn, but there is an openness in the steadiness of his gaze. Maedhros sits straighter in his saddle._

_“Maedhros Feanorian, the citizens of Mithrim are the only family I have left in the world. If ever something were to happen to me, I place this trust on you: care for my people as though they were your own.”_

_Two days ago, Maedhros had turned away from the stripes layering Rumil’s back. _

_Now, he says only, “I will do what I can, of course. But Athair will not fail you.”_

In what is, by Maedhros’s count, the sixth circle of Angband’s hell, he remembers once again both Rumil and—Athair—stilled. Maedhros swallows hard, pulling his wrists upward so his cuffs dig into his skin.

Rumil may well be dead. He has a chance to live though, because Maglor did not heed the dreadful wish of his brother’s heart.

_Fuck_, there he goes again. No. _No_.

If he pictures his brother and his once dream-starred eyes, if he remembers even for a second the struggling arms, the long-silent voice—

“Breathe, Maitimo. There, I have gone too far too quickly. I recall my promise: I shall not demand more than you can now give me. Not that I shall not demand it again of you later, but first—well, first we should make you more comfortable.”

A quick pat on the head, and Morgoth releases Maedhros, who feels like he is on a boat that has just violently rammed into rock and ricocheted off into deeper water.

The gas-lit room about him shines blearily, his vision turns sideways, as though he were lifted over by a wave, and the mass of vines in the corner slides to the left.

“What do you mean?” he manages to say. A foolish question, as if he wants to know.

“Why, only that I am a gentleman, and you, fallen as you are, have forgotten how thus to act. No, do not protest, or apologize. You know I blame Feanor for your ruin, though admittedly you have shown a proclivity for certain weaknesses...”

This is not a new circle of hell. This is merely a revisiting of past torture, and the shame and grief mingle together in blunt knife hurt. Maedhros cannot attend.

_Somewhere, Mairon feeds his forge and grows greedy upon a stomach empty of blood. _

_Somewhere, Mairon’s belt cries out for another trophy. You think, hysterically, that it will be a strange reunion of sorts, the only one that could ever be. Perhaps your thumb, or your scalp, and all the rest of your hair. But you will be dead._

“Gentlemen, Maitimo, should always have a hobby or two to keep them from idleness. Had you any hobbies?”

Maedhros is utterly lost.

Morgoth is moving around him, rearranging jars on the shelf, dusting off the translucent coffins of his gruesome collection. He opens the cupboard again and drags out a length of rope.

“Well?”

Maedhros shakes his head, because he cannot speak, because the overpowering scent of chemical pine has begun to affect his brain, and he cannot quite believe that Morgoth is not relentlessly pressing a stone against the back of his skull.

Morgoth tuts.

“A shame. Perhaps if you had found alternative interests, you would not have associated with so many ladies of light virtue.” Morgoth chuckles palely, bloodless and amused, and then, without warning, he steps close to Maedhros and threads the rope through the belt loops of his trousers. He ties it tight. Very tight.

Maedhros stiffens, but Morgoth steps away, leaving only a heavy hand on Maedhros’s elbow.

The rope hangs with the chains.

“I have a plan for us, Maitimo. You are wary of giving me information, and this I understand, for were our places switched, and I the dog and you the master, I too would yelp and whine before speaking as I ought.”

“Were you the dog, I would have shot you already for a rabid beast.”

The space of the silence in the conservatory is as wide as the desert Maedhros once sweat and thirsted in. It is just as false a silence too, because with each passing second, Maedhros’s heart beats louder, and his tongue crinkles dryly against his throat, his teeth, his swollen gum.

Something chitters and scratches in his ear—a nagging, horrified brother, a trapped mouse, the grey-banded spider come back to life, scrabbling against its glass tomb.

Morgoth’s pale jaw is fashioned of marble, and his eyes as well. They shine two-toned, black and cold white. He does not blink.

“I was going to give you a choice, boy, a chance to listen quietly and grow in knowledge and wisdom. You could have sat at my feet and heard my instruction. We could have, in the end, conversed like gentlemen, sharing our secrets.”

_Have you done it? Mairon will be _yours_ now, your death. You’ve won. _

Maedhros shudders in relief—in too-early relief that dies after one breath when Morgoth straightens the wide black shoulders of his suit, strides to the door, casts a calculating eye back at Maedhros, then calls out, “Murphy, bring in the chair.”

Even as Maedhros staggers back into the yellow table, back where no escape is or could be, Morgoth plucks the white butterfly from its screen and advances toward him.

Maedhros freezes, glances wildly behind him for the small knife he saw on the table before, but his hands cannot rise from waist height, nor can they stretch forward, and Morgoth, smile tilted knowingly, removes the knife and deposits it in his own breast pocket.

“Be calm, Maitimo, be steady, and you might get through the evening without any little hurts.”

The door opens then, and two men drag in a chair Maedhros knows far too well, each and every strap and buckle.

Maedhros struggles more with his own despair than with the men who kick his knees, press him against the wood, exchange his restraints. The chains fall to the floor, and Murphy throws them in a corner.

The only indignity Maedhros does not suffer is the collar around his neck.

Morgoth waves the guards out of the room before they can secure it. He stands between the door and Maedhros, looming like the lightning-white twisted horror Maedhros has forever known him to be.

_“Where are we going? Where are we going?”_

_Why do you always come _here_?_

Morgoth raises Maedhros’s chin gently and holds the snowy butterfly before his gaze.

“It is fitting, is it not, to use this creature in the testing of your resolve?”

Maedhros does not understand, and he understands less when Morgoth reaches down and stabs the butterfly through the shirt just over Maedhros’s heart. A mockery of a boutonniere for a mockery of—whatever he once was.

Maedhros’s hands have been fastened palm up, and he curls them into fists briefly.

“I will ask you no questions, lad,” Morgoth says, “but I will play most fair. I think that, in a short while, you will beg me to hear your answers. Silence now! I am observant, I saw you shudder when you thought me distracted. So—wait.”

Maedhros can do little else. Murphy took particular delight in pulling tight the straps, and Maedhros can move neither legs nor arms the slightest bit. Even his torso is wrapped rigid to the chair, across the waist and the chest, and the shirt Morgoth bestowed on him in derision is pinched in place.

The butterfly lost a wing.

Morgoth steps out of sight, towards his collection, and Maedhros strains his neck. It is not that foreknowledge of Morgoth’s cruelties enables him to steel himself, to make him an immovable seawall against the relentless ocean of cruelty, but Morgoth invisible is a terror that trembles upon his skin, and under it.

The touch from nowhere, the fingers digging into wounds, or suddenly skimming and seizing the bits of hair left to him—

“I used to have many more specimens of the living, breathing sort, back in New York.” Morgoth says, sonorous voice floating where Maedhros cannot see. “Betimes, I wish I had not practiced patience, and had snatched you off the street, or from whatever ball or brothel floor you could be scraped. We could have had such a time together.”

_You saw him, you saw him there once, and you ran. You were a fool to think you could forever escape, when his thought has wrapped around you in strangling-rough lasso coils since you were thirteen._

There is a faint scratching sound, and a fainter hum. 

“That would have changed much, indeed. I wonder what your father would have given me, to see you returned without so much as a hair taken from you.”

Maedhros cannot answer. He stops contorting his neck, and the butterfly screen in front of him hazes, a watercolor of tears and dead things.

“We shall never know, I suppose.” Morgoth stands behind him now, massive hands gripping the sides of Maedhros’s chair, chest pressed against the back of Maedhros’s head.

Maedhros will—not—move.

_Do nothing. Say nothing. He means to dig up your whitest nerves, and the mudded shames and fears you’ve buried deep in the cisterns of your selfish, ugly heart._

_If even Maglor would not bargain for you—_

_Remember you are to be breathless soon, remember you have begun to map the path to your grave, and that whatever pain or humiliation Morgoth plans will be brought to naught. Soon, you will wake no more._

_You will be a burden to no one, least of all yourself._

_Will they bury you or burn you, or leave you to rot?_

Morgoth must bend near, for his breath tickles the hair atop Maedhros’s head as he speaks. Always that horrid, confiding, deceptively soft tone.

“In New York, I had two large rooms dedicated to Oriental curios. You would gasp to see the silks and chinas, the fans and the odd little daggers whose designs whispered poetically of dangerous, deadly mysticisms. I spent hours cataloguing them, studying them, yet even more attention did I give to the creatures I had imported from around the world.”

Maedhros does not care to guess what these creatures were, but it does not matter. Morgoth seems determined to tell him anyway.

“I particularly loved a deadly frog, _Phyllabate terribilis_, I believe is the Latin name. An innocuous thing, except for the poison that coats its golden skin—enough poison, they say, to be the end of ten grown men. It certainly was enough for two fools in my employ who could not follow simple instructions.”

Poison is a terrible way to die. Fin—Maedhros has heard tell of medical cases, of blue-veined faces, foaming mouths, swollen tongues.

Poison is death still.

“Do you have this creature even now?” Maedhros is unable to quell the fearful, hopeful question. His fingers tremble, but he is wary of clutching them into fists on the arms of his chair, lest the movement draw Morgoth’s attention.

“No,” Morgoth says, regretfully. “I do not.”

Without warning, he heaves Maedhros and the chair together, spinning and scraping them round so that Maedhros now faces the yellow table, the vines, and the jars.

“Mayhap, I have something more thought-provoking.”

One of the gas lamps dims, and the flame shrinks, sputters, cuts out. Morgoth pats at Maedhros’s knee as he steps by, and the ring of Feanor flashes in the dying light.

_-_

_“Twist it round and round, Maedhros, three times. (Now lay your head down, lest your mother think I do not put you to sleep with my tales.)”_

_Maedhros obeys. _

_“Imagine!” This, a silent whisper that thrills gently in Maedhros’s chest like chimes tinkling in the wind. “Imagine what magic will spring alive, what distant horn will sound? What thunderous war cry will echo through the land? On the horizon, just under the rising sun, it may be the Fianna will come riding, riding, searching for a reawakened hero, their last captain, Fionn Mac Cumhaill himself.”_

_“Athair, who shall Fionn be? You?”_

_“Nay child! There is only one so brave in all the land, so strong and cunning, and I have raised him well. Be ready then, to wield a spear against Ireland’s foes, and to stand against those who would harm your blood!”_

_Maedhros, clenching his small, swollen baby hands, is ready for any battle, so long as Athair is by his side._

_-_

Maedhros has tried, has tried so hard to be brave. But as he has failed—everyone—he fails himself. Morgoth reaches into his coat, and Maedhros tenses, waits for the return of the humiliating darts, or the little knife Morgoth uses to dissect and preserve. He can imagine the latter slipped into his own skin again and again in minute wounds that nevertheless widen the chasm between who he was and who no one will ever see.

He waits, and is wrong.

Morgoth pulls on his gloves once more.

_A long time ago, you believed anything was possible. Since then, you have learnt you how horribly mixed up you were. Every hero dies, or turns out a fool._

_Hell, you were never even that._

_-_

Morgoth steps almost silently toward the most shadowy corner of the room, and as he nears the mesh of hanging vines, the mound of its dark coils seems to shiver with his tread.

Maedhros does as well.

He has experienced this moment before, he has known the steady rhythm of boot upon wood, and he knows, no, he _knew_ why the vines moved, except not this time, this time there is only an inexplicable illness swelling in his gullet, rising in his throat, and for humidity or uncertainty he sweats.

Morgoth crouches, just for a moment, his broad shoulders arcing over the rest of him. He pokes gently at the tangled black greenery on the floor, and _something_ uncurls, _something_ stretches and rises, _something_ denser and darker than the shadows, unpierced by light, and—another poke—the _something_—hisses—darts forward with alien quickness and

Morgoth deftly captures it in his gloves.

_-_

_“Hush, hush, my darling, you’ve woken your baby brother.”_

_“Mamaí, please, there is a monster under my pillow, it’s going to eat me—”_

“_Oh Maitimo, what an ugly little spider friend you’ve found.”_

_“It is _not_ my friend—it ran across my hand!”_

_“Look at him trembling though. You, my love, are much more terrifying to it than it to you. This little thing does not eat copper-haired Irish angels, only the insects in my garden.”_

_“Please, Mamaí, please save me.”_

_“Always.”_

_-_

“Her name,” Morgoth says, “is Ungoliant.”

_-_

_It isn’t real it cannot be real _

_It’s fucking enormous is what it is_

_-_

Maedhros is a child no longer, and some nightmares can be grown out of. Even so, he sits as still as stone when Morgoth brings his pet into the light, for it is twice the size of the grey banded spider in the jar, with a chaos of eyes and legs that flail wildly about, seeking an escape through the bars of Morgoth’s fingers.

A hopeless quest.

The thing is incredibly hideous, and—it was sitting there all this time. Maedhros has no shoes, and he, for a brief moment, is overcome by the notion that had Morgoth maneuvered him so, he could easily have stepped on the spider, or felt it legs brush over his toes, or across his ankles—

He mutters a disgusted curse he does not even mean to form. Morgoth, who could not have misheard the word, says, “You must speak more clearly, lad, if I am to understand you at all. Have you a request? Information to share?”

The spider has worn itself out rapidly, or perhaps it is wiser than Maedhros. Its struggle abates.

Maedhros turns away, compressing his mouth and his revulsion.

In the somewhat slanted wall to the right, a long line crooks through the stone like a sidewinder snake. It is so dark it might be black water, or the mountain’s blood.

_In another life, concealed as your fears were, the monster would have terrified you. But now your father and brother have been stolen violently from you, and in your grief you have been stripped to the bone and the soul and whipped into a mockery. _

_You are already on the other side of yourself._

_It’s just a god-damned spider._

_-_

“She’s cousin to the tarantulas who inhabit this very mountain, Maitimo. Ah yes, you would see quite a few of them, were you to walk out of doors come September. There is a massive migration at that time, for mating purposes of course.”

Morgoth holds the monstrous thing aloft, and one fat leg rises slowly and scrapes at his gloves. “Would you care to see her closer?”

Would Maedhros like to lose another tooth? Would he like to return—there are no good answers in this place.

Expending a certain amount of effort, Maedhros draws his gaze away from the glittering black shine centered in the spider’s head. 

Morgoth hums and strokes Ungoliant’s wretched body as though it were Maedhros’s own pate.

“It pains me that you fail to see this marvelous creature as I do, Maitimo. But halt there—perhaps I demand too much of you again.”

If Maedhros looks now, at the cruel hands that have mocked and manipulated him, he can almost imagine that they are ringless under the thick gloves.

“Mairon,” Morgoth continues, “is not fond of Ungoliant either, and I would put up the Mithrim mine and more on the venture that he will take his hunting elsewhere come autumn. He will not wish to stumble over more of the creatures.”

Maedhros does not concern himself whether Mairon will be far or nigh in September. He will soon have no concerns at all.

Ungoliant sits very quietly now.

_-_

_“It’s not natural a creature with such a high count of legs should have an equal number of eyes. There must have been an accident in its creation.” Maglor, half-draped off the porch, arms hanging down, pokes at a tiny brown spider scuttling across his sheet of half-filled-in stanzas. _

_The summer afternoon glows just this side of over-warm._

_Maedhros doesn’t reply. He’s blinking sleepily, lounging in a wicker chaise, with trousers and shirt sleeves both rolled up. He’s grown another inch, and his bare feet rest on Maglor’s back._

_Maglor keeps right on talking. “God, I’m hungry.”_

_ Caranthir, by virtue of being the only other brother not out fishing, hunting, or working with Athair in the forge, has claimed the canvas hammock rigged up by Celegorm. Belatedly, he grunts from behind the book his nose is buried in. _

_“You have two eyes and two legs. Same ratio. Lot of good it does you.” _

_Before Maglor can do more than rear up his head in offense, Maedhros laughs warmly._

_“What Caranthir means,” he says, flicking at Maglor’s longish hair with his toes, “is that there are fresh-made biscuits and honey not three steps into the kitchen. Wait a moment, and I’ll fetch a plate for us all.”_

_ The honey is sweet, the biscuits soft, and Maedhros’s crusty gentle brothers relax their prickling hackles._

_-_

_You don’t have brothers, you don’t have brothers. You don’t have anyone. You don’t exist anymore. Why do you forget?_

“Must I repeat myself?”

Morgoth must—Maedhros’s mind is pre-occupied with closing doors and throwing up whatever shades and shutters he can find.

“Perhaps,” Morgoth says, speaking slowly, as though he wishes to drape each word over Maedhros’s hand, so he might pause and consider its feel, “perhaps you would prefer to answer a different question? Something simple, something that won’t endanger anyone living who is of importance.”

Silence. And then, “The one from before? Did the slave or Feanor design Mithrim, or both together?

Maedhros’s breath quickens. When it comes to this, he can only proffer a single reply.

“I know no slave, only free men.”

_-_

_You beheld the marks on Rumil’s neck, as well as the whiplash wounds. He was bitten deeper than you, and it is not admirable what you proclaim now. A penance, not an act of valor, for you could scarcely bear the sight._

“At turns I half-admire your leaf-like courage, Maitimo. Clinging to your stricken tree through wind and storm, denying the approach of winter and the failure of all you know. And yet—”

Morgoth shakes his head, as if he were a wise professor ill-satisfied with his student’s progress.

_-_

_Hair red and black and gold whirl about in wild dance, and Maedhros’s heart springs as giddy and light as his feet, and it’s the wine, it’s the people, it’s the _hope_—_

_-_

Shades have become fleeting shadows, deficient in their duty.

Maedhros fixes his attention once more upon Ungoliant. A better look at the hideous thing might—might blot out what he cannot bear to see. Might banish the swelling pressure at the base of his throat.

“There is something puerile about your stubbornness, Maitimo. Less a merit, closer to a sin. Would you and your Catholic heart name it so? Sinful? Are you racked with remorse for it?”

Maedhros’s Catholic heart, like his soul, was lost long ago, in bottles, in beds, in the burning of bridges. He drags his words up from his chest, pinned so tight and cruel, and lies.

“Not particularly.”

Morgoth’s thumb runs down one of Ungoliant’s legs, and the spider flinches away.

For an instant, Maedhros almost sympathizes.

“Here, lad.”

_-_

_Maedhros is five, and old enough to hold his tears when the wasp stings his thumb, that is what Athair says. Maedhros must learn to be brave, must learn to be a protector, an angel to guard his brothers. _

_Angels should not cry. St. Michael wouldn’t. Maedhros considers this while standing in the mudroom outside the kitchen, washing up before dinner, biting his lips, though Athair is so against it. _

_A spider runs out from under the washcloth, and Maedhros stumbles back, falling atop Athair’s ash-darkened boots. _

_Later, curled up in bed, arms entwined about little Maglor, Maedhros wonders if Athair should teach him not to be afraid of spiders._

_He never quite has the courage to bring up the subject, not for days, and then—Mother discovers how Maedhros is trying to be strong, and she is so angry at Athair, and training ceases._

_Maedhros does his best, and buries every childish weakness deep in the skin beneath his bones._

_-_

Morgoth in deft motion lowers Ungoliant and nudges the thing so it falls heavily on Maedhros’s right hand, on his upturned palm.

Taken aback, Maedhros grunts and—his hand spasms flat—the spider crawls toward his elbow, clinging its long legs desperately around Maedhros’s bare arm, the arm of the chair—no less desperate to hang tight than Maedhros is to be _away_—

The spider falls into Maedhros’s lap and sits there frozen. Maedhros tenses in his bonds at the drop, and his shirt rubs coarsely against his ruined back. His arm prickles and stings as though the monster has left a trail of hair behind, poked into his skin like miniscule needles, and perhaps it has.

His breath is short, quick through his nose.

This—will pass.

_-_

_Your childhood training failed you before, or did you fail _it_? Maybe—maybe you did not focus enough. You were surprised, and shaken by so many things. Now, you have had a week to yourself, and are preparing for death anyway._

_Yes, death. Pain, and then an end. This will be a—little test. A bit preparation, demanding next to nothing in effort._

_Besides, you fool, what is a spider to a whip, or the brush of your father’s skull? _

Maedhros presses his spine back against the chair, and the weights of the spider and of his own grievous memory lessen as his bitter, half-healed wounds flare like flame mingled with poured out alcohol.

Only now does a faint whimper pass between his lips.

“You’re rather more spineless than I thought,” Morgoth says, in that way of his that is calculated and off-hand all at once. “How pale your cheeks! Here is naught but truth for you: the _Theraphosa blondi_, like its American tarantula cousins, is venomous indeed, but not mortally so.”

Maedhros has not for a second even considered how the spider might hurt him. He merely wishes it would cease to _touch_ him.

“Let me show you. Be brave for me now.” Before Maedhros can understand, or begin to wish Ungoliant were rather more dangerous than its master thought, Morgoth cups his hands around his dark pet and begins to push it gently into Maedhros’s exposed stomach.

Maedhros sucks in his breath and skin all at once, and in his startled, low-thrumming disgust, he betrays himself without thinking.

“Don’t—”

_-_

_“It was a foul trick to play on Maitimo, and you should be ashamed of that wretched little brain of yours.”_

_A whimper, and Maedhros can _see_ the pinched face of his scrawniest brother even though he is on the other side of a fresh-painted stable door. Maglor has been raging for a whole minute, and so Maedhros stops clawing his nails across his shoulder and the bottom of his ear, stops trying to forget the way they still prickle. He has already forgiven Curvo—he’s just a babe._

_All babes have a bit of mischief about them._

_Maglor could be gentler with him. _

_-_

Unexpectedly, Morgoth steps back, and the spider does not bite, but Maedhros still feels as though poison shoots through his veins, burning as he is with shame and an even greater grief that spurts like hot water from small springs he cannot drain himself of.

He clamps his mouth shut.

There will be no begging. Not today.

If there were comfort to be had in closing his eyes, Maedhros would do so. But it is useless—his imagination works only against him now. He can see even in the space of a blink Morgoth reaching for his hair, his ear, his hand. He can only see Mairon smiling, slender fingers extending a tin cup. He can only see this wretched, ugly spider as it sits in his lap, waiting. And somewhere, amid all the horror—flashes of another boy’s life.

Across the room, scarlet flowers shaped like goblets hang limply.

It’s as if the whole world is dying, and not quickly enough.

_-_

_Maedhros swings the stable door open, forcing a smile to rest easily on his lips._

_Little Curufin’s tears coat his face only a little more thickly than white paint flecks Maedhros’s cheeks, covering his sun-born freckles._

_Maedhros had been resting cross-legged, leaning with his back upon the stepladder when the—accident—happened, and when he flung himself about, the paint can had gone flying as well, and Maedhros’s shirt is ruined. _

_This is of no consequence when a little brother can barely breathe for his violent sobbing. _

_Maedhros brushes Maglor’s shoulder, quelling the storm in an instant, and then he sinks to his knees, offering a relatively clean thumb to wipe under Curufin’s watery eyes. Offers, not does without asking, because Curufin is as liable to bite the finger as not. _

_Curufin mumbles something, and Maedhros accepts. Accepts the apology, or the permission, and he comforts his brother as best he can, forgetting, for a while, the way the wolf spider crunched under his ear when he unthinkingly brushed his head against his shoulder to ward off a curious tickle._

_At night, he dreams._

_-_

As a child, even as a young man living in a lonely place for the first time, Maedhros suffered the occasional arachnidian nightmare. Less frequent, but more grievous, were dreams of loss.

Maedhros’s tender lips have suffered torment enough already, but still he pinches them between his teeth.

Useless.

His ears lie to him, perceive faint cries and gushing tears, boyish lungs hitching air.

Maedhros, who has forced himself into silence for several racked, hateful minutes, gasps sharply.

“Your visage breaks faith with your will, Maitimo, though you strive so for stoicism. Do not be prideful now, only say the word and I shall grant you relief.”

Relief, mercy—Maedhros seeks only death, and that is the one gift _Morgoth_ will not give him.

Maedhros lowers his head, compelling himself to gaze upon Ungoliant’s ugliness, and to be grateful that his own ruination, wretched though it is, has not made him so wholly hideous.

_Presently, you shall be dead, and your body will turn to dust, and everything about you may be forgotten. (Everything?)_

The spider quivers in Maedhros’s lap, her front legs still propped up against him just under his ribs.

_So many have touched you there, marveling. You cannot speak all of them in the same sentence. _

_You deserve this too._

_-_

Maedhros has steadied his breathing, and the spider sits so still it might be dead. All is quiet.

Daring to steal a glance, Maedhros observes Morgoth’s poisoned-moon skin twitching across his cheeks, at the corner of his eyes, and before—before some days ago, Maedhros would have felt an ephemeral roil of satisfaction that the monster might be displeased with the overall colorless results of his latest attempt to faze his prize catch.

Now, he recognizes only that his moment of respite will be brief.

Morgoth turns half away and raises a pointed finger to his chin. “I am considering what I shall do with Ungoliant,” he says softly. “Her use is running out. You must give me your opinion.”

Maedhros’s arm has grown many small reddish spots, and it stings as if it has been rolled in flakes of glass. No doubt his stomach will follow suit. He grits his teeth and speaks recklessly, tautly.

“Drop a brick on her.”

There is a silence, and then—

“You have the wrong idea of me,” Morgoth says, “if you think I would destroy anything in such a manner that it cannot serve me.

_-_

_“Everything in my forge has a purpose, Maedhros, and it must be able to fulfill that purpose. A twisted tool is of little use, and dangerous on top of that. Better to melt it down, and begin anew.”_

_“But Athair, isn’t this your best-favored hammer?”_

_“No more, little one. No more.”_

_-_

Morgoth has moved almost behind Maedhros. He leans forward and picks at Maedhros’s ear as though its shape confounds him. Or perhaps he really does regret the state of his prisoner’s hair. He pinches at it now, tugs it so a small bit feathers over the top of the ear it used to curtain in copper waves.

Morgoth’s gloves are cold as his hands.

Maedhros resolutely maintains his composure, or tries to, but it is long since he functioned as he ought.

If this all together is the melting process, it runs long and hard.

Morgoth returns to Maedhros’s view. He slips a small, green fruit from one of his funereal coat’s pockets, but does not eat it. It might be an apple.

“Are you hungry, lad? I have not inquired of late as to your diet, but as you walked here on your own feet, I presume you no longer require assistance in your daily functions.”

Maedhros always feels hollow now, whether he be forced to eat or no. Spiders are hollow too, or at least, they have no bones.

Maedhros’s eyes stray to his thin fingers, then across the floorboards and up the cluttered shelves to the lizard with its belly slit open.

“An odd fact about Goliath bird-eaters,” Morgoth begins, ignoring the fact he never received an answer to his question. He speaks slowly, turning the words over as young Maedhros would have done a pretty river-stone, a robin’s blue egg, or a cravat of finest make. “An odd fact, but the savages of Ungoliant’s homeland like to capture and boil her kind. It seems she is something of a delicacy.”

This is too much, too disgusting a notion. Maedhros imagines at once the burning wood, the bubbling water, the fat body and the bristling legs crumpling, and what must come after—

He hurts his neck, so abruptly he jerks to the left, swallowing watery bile so it does not spill over his loose sleeve.

“Ah, Maitimo,” Morgoth begins, in fraudulent dismay, but his next words are lost, because even as Maedhros wipes his lips on the collar of his shirt, digs his fingernails into his palm, Ungoliant springs upward, catching at both skin and material, and Maedhros, in startled agitation, lets slip a hint of a low cry as he flings his head back.

He blinks wildly before gaining control of his breath, and _jams_ another gasp down his throat. The spider, boneless as it may be, sits heavy on his chest, pressing down like the undefinable force that used to wake him from nightmares, pressing—no—stroking at his throat and under his chin, poking between his collar and skin with feelers or legs or whatever _fucking_ thing that is—

_-_

_“Celegorm, I am not upset with you.”_

_Celegorm’s golden hair, that comes up only to Maedhros’s chest, puffs up and out just like his lower lip. “Mag would be.”_

_Maedhros pauses, because Maglor would not be the only one to object to the poorly sealed paper box of beetles, earwigs, and cloth moths tucked under Celegorm’s bed. “I’m afraid he would be right in that, you shouldn’t keep—how many bugs do you have in here? No, I’m still not angry.”_

_Little Celegorm’s eyes are alight with a stubbornness known only to him, and his face is red (though that might be extenuated by a sticky patch of sweet-smelling strawberry jam). His delicate baby eyebrows knit together fiercely. He is five, and a force already._

_“Do I hafta throw them out?”_

_Maedhros opens his mouth, but Celegorm leaps forward and clings to his hip, to his arm. _

_“I can’t, or Cob will starve!” _

_Cob, it turns out, is the spindly little spider which has made a silver-glistened home in the window of the bedroom Celegorm shares with three-year-old Caranthir._

_(Caranthir cannot possibly know about the bug collection, or pantry as it were, or he would wail and turn quite red. Then again, if Celegorm were to tell him it was a special secret, the bairn might toddle along with the idea, feeling proud to share something other than bed space with his older brother.)_

_As spiders go, Cob is not so ugly, or jumpy, or sneaky, and Maedhros does not feel an urge to squish him, or to remove him from his web and window. (He couldn’t anyway, not with Celegorm’s eyes widening towards tears with every passing second.)_

_“His leg is broken,” Celegorm whispers, taking Maedhros’s hand in his own and squeezing it tightly. “He’s scared and he can’t get his own food. He’s ‘fraid he’s going to die. I gotta give him butterflies and stuff.”_

_Maedhros is good at being serious. “Did he tell you that himself?”_

_Celegorm nods vigorously. _

_“Well then,” Maedhros says, and that’s that. _

_Cob stays in the window, and Celegorm still gets to feed him, although Maedhros constructs a somewhat better container for the food pantry, and convinces Celegorm to keep _that_ inside another box, to lessen the likelihood of a fantastic escape._

_All is well, until the day Maedhros wakes up to a solemn Celegorm, and is called upon to assist at a funeral under a cherry tree._

_“He liked cherries,” Celegorm says, eating one in Cob’s honor._

_Maedhros eats one too, because he cannot say, “It’s just a spider.” _

_Celegorm will have to figure that out on his own._

_-_

_This is just a spider. It’s hungry, that’s all. It doesn’t intend to hurt you, it just wanted the butterfly. Of course. You are never anything but collateral damage. _

_They wanted—Athair. They were chasing—_

_Here are the tears, again. You might choke on them._

_Save Mairon the trouble._

_-_

The spider’s weight vanishes, but Maedhros does not lift his head from where it lies over the back of his chair. He does not open his eyes, not yet.

Something that smells and feels like leather brushes at Maedhros’s cheeks, and that is when he jerks away, returns fully to the conservatory and all its loathsome little horrors and its sickening pine stink.

Morgoth hovers over him, wiping one hand, along with Maedhros’s tears, on his long black suit. The spider sits at Morgoth’s feet.

Morgoth’s other hand, still gloved, passes over Maedhros’s short hair, and pats at it soothingly.

“Courage, Maitimo, courage. A son of Feanor should not be so fragile. What a child you are, to be frightened by such an inconsequential thing.”

_He mistakes you._

Once (not just once) Morgoth moved swiftly, leaning into Maedhros, warning, threatening someone he loved.

(“Mairon cannot know. Mairon would kill the one who did it.”)

_You can’t say their names, can you? Remember them, yes, but say them? Never again, not for anyone to hear._

_-_

“Maitimo.”

Morgoth leans in now, leans down so he is eye to eye with Maedhros, and he curves a hand about Maedhros’s shoulder, which can scarcely move for the tightness of his bonds. Morgoth’s other hand wraps about Maedhros’s neck, fingers playing with the hair at his nape.

Apprehension and revulsion whirl together, a storm-mudded river of emotion that never recedes at its banks, only rises and rises and overcomes, and Maedhros is but a self-damned soul who will suffer endless grief and weariness until there is no more Maedhros to be wearied.

He does not hear Morgoth’s next words. They are as lost to him as he is to Morgoth’s black night gaze.

“Is there aught else you weep for?” Morgoth must be repeating himself again, but the pine-needle-soft timbre of his voice holds constant, and his kind words snake around Maedhros as awfully as his touch. “Tell me, that I might keep my word and stay myself from over-burdening your frail spirit.”

A frail spirit can snap like a dried branch, loud and sharp, brittle and splintered. Even as Maedhros’s eyes fall down and away, he draws in a deep, shuddering breath and exhales two weak yet venomous words.

“Fuck you.”

_-_

_Angels do not weep. Should not. Not warrior angels. _

_Maedhros is neither angel nor warrior, not anymore. Not ever. It was all falsehoods and well-crafted fairytales, dreams he clung to when he had the foolish wit to lie to himself—_

_He falls again and again, in strange beds, by strange waters, in strange caverns, and not a single soul can rescue him from such a descent, and he does not deserve it anyway, but oh how the wretched can wish_

_to tremble_

_no more_

_-_

“And they gave the savages clothes to wear, but it did not civilize them.” Morgoth’s tone is Scripture-like in its solemnity. Weighty, like the hand that cups the back of Maedhros’s head and pushes, pushes against it so that Maedhros is forced to bend at the neck, to lower himself slowly before his captor.

Maedhros’s teeth ache, the ones he has and the one he has not, because he crushes them together.

The butterfly has vanished from his shirt.

Morgoth sets the spider upon him once more, and it begins to climb.

_-_

_“Shh, _grah mo chree_, nothing can reach you in my arms, I am too tall, and will only grow.”_

_“But, Maitimo,” the troubled whisperer replies, “who will protect you from the bears and the coyotes and all the other beasts?”_

_-_

One leg, scrabbling against his thoat. Another poking in his ear. Maedhros contorts his neck stiffly, because the spider will not be thrown off, cannot be thrown off. Nausea rules his stomach, but his mind is only half present...

_-_

_Maedhros, smiling, buries his face in the copper hair, kissing the very top of his littlest brother’s head._

_“Me too,” Amras calls, “hold me too!”_

_Maedhros carries them both, one on each hip, and as he walks up the garden path under the summer full moon, he whispers sweet Irish nothings, and the twins fade into sleep, confident they are safe._

_-_

It is a strange flash of knowledge when Maedhros realizes that he can see the reflection of the gas lamps in the ceiling, that there is only glass between him and the world above, for this is a conservatory, and plants need light, even the horrid relics Morgoth grows, and he searches desperately for sight of the moon.

He cannot remember what it’s shape may be.

“I’d close my eyes if I were you.” Morgoth’s voice is low and cool, winter-iron sliding across the skin. “The effect tarantula hair has upon the eyes is disturbing to behold. It would pain me to know I ruined your sight.”

Maedhros obeys, clenching his jaw, clenching his fists, because the spider scrapes her belly across his cheek, just near his ear, and a leg scratches the bridge of his nose and _fuck_ how much longer does he have to endure this foul creature—

_Hold fast._

“Ah yes,” Morgoth continues, and Maedhros can hear the dread smile poisoning his previous kind words, turning them an ugly green. “You have your father’s eyes, if not their particular fire. A fool’s gold, but beautiful none the less, and I prize them enough to keep them safe.”

Maedhros bites his tongue, and makes not a sound.

_Hold fast. Hate the spider more than the words. The words mean nothing you have not already heard. Hold fast, and soon both torments, tangible and intangible, will drift away with your breath, float away with your blood, sink into the earth with your body. _

_Remember Mairon._

_-_

Morgoth prizes Maedhros. Morgoth prizes his spider.

Maedhros would kill both if he could, but his chair and chains are heavy, and he is weak.

_-_

_In a dream, Maedhros says, “It is well that ends well. Curufin never tried to pull a trick like that again.”_

_“Perhaps he did not realize how shaken you were?” (This voice is far away, soft, and yet not so.) “I suppose he did not recognize your particular disgust for the eight-legged creatures?”_

_Maedhros says nothing._

_“Or,” the voice continues, “Maglor, in all his fiery, musical rage—what an orchestra he must have been—Maglor frightened him into good behavior.”_

_Maedhros would smile if this were not a nightmare. If this were not a dizzying dream begun in flame and continuing in suffocating dark, he might say, “Or maybe Curufin did not wish to hurt me anymore.”_

_Curufin is sharp, not cruel. He takes after Athair, in that way. _

_Maedhros knows what real cruelty is._

_-_

The spider crawls down to his other shoulder, and Maedhros tilts his head away. He does not allow himself to think of it, its hind legs clamped about his neck holding itself steady, and he finds that ignoring Ungoliant’s existence is easier than pushing away pain-charcoaled shadows who _must_ no longer need him.

He bites the inside of his cheek now, to spare his stinging lips and to ward himself from Morgoth’s increased attentions. The chemically induced headache from before spikes again, and Maedhros wishes only to be sent away to his cell, to lie down in the dark underneath whatever warmth Galway’s blanket will give him, and to press his temple with his own hand while pretending he does not exist.

He slumps against his bonds only a little, and Morgoth is upon him at once.

“How extraordinarily weary you seem amid the shreds of your fortitude, lad. Weary, and young. I am almost turned to pity.”

Morgoth removes one glove, and his hand take place of the spider, brushing at Maedhros’s brow.

Almost as a father did an errant son’s, promising leniency and forgetfulness of offenses.

Maedhros has hardly offended Morgoth Bauglir enough.

He draws himself together now, stacks bone upon bone and pulls muscle over muscle, for the defiance he must play at requires a biting energy he does not possess.

“You want my knowledge and wisdom,” he says breathlessly, knowing the exact amount he has ever had. “That’s the point of all this.”

Morgoth’s thumb descends to Maedhros’s cheekbone.

“Your words are not my words,” he says, “but go on, share your secrets, child, and save yourself from greater pains. You may call _that_ wisdom, should you like.”

Maedhros splits his lip in a ghostly, crooked grimace and the knot in his stomach twists tighter as he endeavors to mask the state of his nerves with splintered disdain.

“Your vines need watering.”

_-_

_The trouble with you, Maedhros, is you can’t decide if you are playing at dice or a game of chess. _

_Or maybe the trouble is you play solely to lose._

_-_

In the dark, dark room, in the silent glow of gas lamps that require cleaning and better attention, coated as they are with black film near the top and bottom of the glass panes, there is a prickling pause. Then, in the most even tone in the world:

“Roguishness is less than becoming, Maitimo, no matter what the ladies tell you. It grieves me that you have yet to learn sobriety and better judgment.”

Morgoth turns away and begins to push aside the jars on the shelves, missing the way Maedhros’s lashes flutter half-closed.

“If I were to stoop to making wishes in wells, or to rubbing Oriental lamps,” Morgoth continues, “I very well might ask that you take your situation and my gestures of reconciliation more seriously.”

Maedhros does not respond, has no more retorts, barbed or otherwise. It seems he can shake neither of the monsters in his presence.

“Ah, here it is.” Morgoth has found an extraordinarily large jar with a somewhat narrower top, smudged with fingerprints and colored on its inside walls with a strange yellowish substance.

“I have not had time to wash it out since its last occupant,” Morgoth says regretfully. “A hard business, Maitimo, ordering the world around me. Feanor would have understood _that_, though he insisted on being my enemy. So little time for the things one loves, whether one is planning the destruction of a railway or its creation.”

While he speaks, Morgoth removes Ungoliant from Maedhros’s shoulder, and then, gently, carefully, dispassionately, he inserts the spider into the jar. It is a tight fit through the opening, and Ungoliant struggles briefly before folding her legs against her body and allowing herself to be pushed in.

Once inside the jar, Ungoliant sits half sideways, her legs crooked and cramped. She stares through the glass at Maedhros, and Maedhros stares back, each a distorted, trapped thing.

“You must miss him, though you were ever so different.”

_-_

_Shining black hair, and brighter eyes, bent over forge-fire and crinkled maps, and it is never the right time anymore for words. The only sentences that matter are the ones Maedhros spoke long ago._

_“I swear on my life, Athair.”_

_And so, the life must be handed over, and though Maedhros would give much to forget the needs of Mithrim, would give almost anything for a quiet evening, and one more hour—one more minute—resting his head on the beloved broad shoulder, those chances have dwindled into impossibility. _

_There is work to be done. _

_Thus, memory remains, though not only of the settlement Athair seems intent on transforming into a fortress. When Maedhros feels most lonely, and forces himself to pass by the door of the gold-dust girl Nora, who would flirt with him from dawn till dusk were she able, and do many other things after—he takes to the whiskey or wine, whatever he can lay his hands on. In the drunken useless space between sins unwrought and loving arms betrayed and abandoned, Maedhros remembers tales of fireside and bedside, and Athair recounting not diamond dreams but rather myths and legends in diamond cut words._

_Maedhros, born to be a coward and many things worse, loved the Irish heroes well. He used to reach up and touch Athair’s lips when he spoke of Fionn mac Cumhaill, who harmed himself to save the city of Tara from Aillen the Burner. _

_“Some say it were poison he consumed, to keep himself from sleep, while others tell that he would tilt his spear, bound by spells to make it burn fresh from the forge, and press it full-strength against his forehead._

_No, Nelya. He did not weep one little bit.”_

_-_

Everything burns. Maedhros’s carved out chest, his every cramped muscle, his ash-grey eyes that have no more tears to weep, nor any right to weep if they were able.

Another gas lamp has dimmed or gone out. The conservatory has never been more shadowed.

Stepping between Maedhros and the spider, Morgoth begins to undo the straps about Maedhros’s arms and wrists.

“We must learn to balance our needs and desires, Maitimo, and sacrifice pastimes when we must, whether they be the studies of the flesh, for you, or studies of the scientific sort, for me.”

Heat of grief turns to heat of mingled shame and spite, flairing weakly in Maedhros’s veins before ebbing away entirely.

_This day _will_ conclude. All the wretched times of your past life had their beginnings and their endings, and beginnings again, but Morgoth is only a strange and terrifying middle, and Mairon will be the end, the sort of end that is hopelessly and thankfully—final._

_You cannot say where the beginning was._

Maedhros’s first arm freed, Morgoth takes the rope that hangs from Maedhros’s waist and loops it over his hand. The second arm freed, Morgoth crosses the wrists and winds them intricately together so that they are secured with not more than six inches of slack from Maedhros’s stomach.

Heat, of warmed water in pipes, rises slowly in the air about Maedhros, but his blood sludges cold in his veins.

_-_

“Stand, Maitimo. Rest your weight on my arm if you must.”

Maedhros does not take the arm.

Morgoth might call him pale, foolish, and stubborn again—but he does not. He only sets the tall stool closer to the yellow table, and bids Maedhros perch himself atop it.

Guides him, when Maedhros moves not at all.

Seated once more, his shoulders hunched under his stained shirt, his toes brushing the floorboards instead of the low footrest, Maedhros rests his bound hands on his trousers. Faint light glares its reflection off Ungoliant’s jar, and Maedhros almost sees an image of himself there, drowning in more than borrowed clothes.

“A strange bird,” Morgoth murmurs, so soft Maedhros for once thinks he was not meant to hear.

_-_

_“Unsightly.” _

_The word swoops in, a falcon of judgment, and you bat it away in coarse mortification, because this voice you recognize, and miss, and must say goodbye to like every other. It does not matter the context of the conversation then, you tell yourself fiercely, whether Maglor laughed or swore, loved or hated you._

_You must let him go._

_All of them._

_\- _

“Here we are together still, lad, and I have a thought to combine my business with pleasure.”

_Maybe you are wrong. Maybe this day never _will_ end._

Something clicks, the cabinet door, perhaps, but Maedhros’s eyes are closed.

“Perhaps that is not fair terminology,” Morgoth continues with scarcely a pause. “I do not like to call you my business, as it implies something less intimate and transformative then what I desire. Nevertheless, we have made our relationship so, a thing of exchange. Watch then, and benefit.”

Underneath the words, Maedhros hears a slight, glassy thunk, and the twisting of a tin lid.

_Games you used to play, when young. Games when you taught, though something else when you learned. What can you sense in the dark?_

_“If you were blinded, cut off from me or any who could give you aid,” said one now dead._

_“If we wake up hungry, and want to sneak down to the kitchen without waking a soul,” said a boy who never thought he would want to die._

_“If we play Blind Man’s Buff, and you wish to catch a girl by the sound of her breathing alone,” said a thrice-damned fool._

_-_

“I will not force you to answer, Maitimo, but I require you to regard me, so that the lesson may not be for naught. I have determined Ungoliant’s fate.”

A hand, a beat under his chin, and Maedhros opens his eyes.

On the table Morgoth has placed another jar beside his spider’s, one full of a clear liquid. The smell is strong, but it is not formaldehyde.

“Alcohol,” Morgoth says. “If you wish to preserve a spider, or any insect, you cannot put it in formaldehyde, lest you ruin the specimen. Neither have I perfected a way to preserve them dry. So, alcohol, a seventy percent solution mixed with water. Watch.”

Morgoth is repetitive in everything he says and much that he does. Maedhros observes him in frozen fascination, an ensnared rabbit following the movement of a circling hawk.

Morgoth begins to pour.

_-_

When the alcohol first trickles into Ungoliant’s jar, she lifts one leg slowly, as if surprised. Not yet concerned.

When the alcohol begins to rise, she scrabbles against the glass in spurts.

“I believe it does sting a bit,” Morgoth says, as if answering a question Maedhros has not asked, “and there is some danger of her damaging herself. A pity, for I am fond of her, but I have no time for other procedures.”

The alcohol envelops Ungoliant, and she waves her many legs about in a weak sort of violence, losing control, breath, sight—and Maedhros can neither inhale nor exhale.

Once, he was plunged headfirst again and again into bitter cold water, so that he swallowed it and burned his lungs, coughed and shivered wildly.

Gothmog chuckled in his ear before drowning him, but Morgoth only smiles faintly and glances at Ungoliant out of the corner of his eye. His gaze is fixed almost entirely on Maedhros.

_-_

_“Amrod, do not swim so deep. The sea has currents today that could sweep you beyond my reach.”_

_“But Athair says I am a fish!”_

_“Please, Amrod. Do not leave my side.”_

_-_

Hot salt-water burns a line down Maedhros’s cheek, and he closes his eyes as Ungoliant spasms awkwardly into death, her bristled legs beating fruitlessly through the alcohol, against the side of her jar.

Morgoth does not strike Maedhros upon the chin again, or give him anymore commands, but at last he says, “It is finished.”

_-_

_It is not the submersion that killed her, he tells you, as if that is a comfort. Spiders do not require as much oxygen as humans, and it could take them an hour to die where (and here he speaks so normally, though he were cutting you open with a serrated blade) a young lad might perish in minutes. _

_He speaks as if the poisonous alcohol were a mercy then, and—you must agree with him. _

_-_

Half of Ungoliant’s legs have curled in on her belly, and one seems bent with injury as well as by death. Morgoth clicks his tongue once.

“I prefer to use the freezing method,” he says with professional regret, “but we do not have all night, and I must send you away presently. I had no choice.” He takes a long metal needle from the cabinet and slips it into the jar.

Gently, he nudges at Ungoliant’s limbs, positioning them the way he wants.

Maedhros does nothing but shiver.

“She is magnificent even now,” Morgoth says. “The alcohol may eventually tinge the color of her hair, but that is nothing. Her appearance otherwise will remain ever the same—her great size and the extension of her legs—and I shall be able to study her and compare her to future specimens at my leisure. For the time being, she remains the greatest treasure in my conservatory.”

_-_

_“You have the wrong idea of me,” Morgoth had said, “if you think I would destroy anything in such a way that it cannot serve me.”_

_Ungoliant is a prisoner still, and Morgoth will not cease to fawn over her wretched body. It is cruel, that death should not mean—escape._

_He won’t kill _you_ as he killed his spider. He cannot preserve you in a jar, to be looked at, marveled over, scrutinized for a multitude of flaws._

_Ungoliant is trapped in death, and you are trapped in life, and the only difference is that Ungoliant was born a hideous creature, while you lied, whored, and murdered your way there._

_Death should mean escape._

_-_

Morgoth folds canvas cloth over the top of Ungoliant’s jar, and winds it close with thick twine.

Maedhros, still hunched over, tenses like coiled wire that has nowhere to spring. He cannot watch Bauglir anymore, nor stare at the pitiful spider whose use alive had run out, and he turns his face away to the left—a mistake.

On the shelf before him, one jar stands out from the rest, a jar in which a small brown bat with a dog-skull face and fangs wraps its wings about itself and leans against the glass. Tiny claws clutch at its sides like infant bone hands, and Maedhros feels sickness creeping inside of himself once more.

He must steel himself against trembling and steel himself for pain.

Maedhros’s hands are reddish, somewhat blood-swollen from being bound. They have little range of motion, tethered as they are to his waist.

“Come, lad,” Morgoth says, beckoning him with the crook of a finger, “come and look upon Ungoliant one last time before your visit with me must come to an end. Behold her whom we have saved for eternity.”

Maedhros has no poison for himself, no spear, and the deed he seeks to perform is nothing so heroic as saving a city, but he does possess fear grown to hatred and more bitter fear again. He does have Mairon, a weapon after the fact.

He is foolish and stupid, to want to cut Morgoth now, but maybe it is all he has left, and maybe Morgoth will be furious enough to send him exactly where he wants to go.

Maedhros is ready enough.

The yellow table is before him, and the dead spider sits close by its edge, and though his hands are bound, he does not need them for what he must do.

_Slip off your stool. Slowly. Lower your head, let him think you servile and reluctant. It is easy to feign unsteadiness that is already half-true, it is easy to stumble forward, and if you fling an elbow up—_

Ungoliant’s jar plunges and shatters, but Maedhros only hears this—something slams into the side of his head, enveloping him in brief darkness. When a moment later he lifts his cheek off the floor, when he blinks the shadows and false stars away, he finds it just so: glass strewn about on the fresh-stained wood like crystalized snow, and amid the lamp-flamed shimmering shards is a sopping mess of spider legs and guts.

Ungoliant is wholly unrecognizable. She was dead, and now she is gone.

Morgoth, having swept Maedhros off his feet with one crowbar-stiff arm, towers above him now, gazing down in eerie, unblinking calm.

Maedhros breathes unevenly, waiting for more punishment, or for Morgoth to call Murphy in to drag him off to his cell in chains. He does not dare think of what he desires most.

Morgoth lowers himself to one knee, whereupon he gathers the mangled remains of his ill-favored spider into his gloves and tilts his hands so the nauseating mess slides bit by bit and drop by drop into Maedhros’s lap.

“You do not know what to value, boy,” Morgoth says as softly as though he were saying good night to an errant child, “nor do you take my lessons to heart. You will have many regrets, I think.”

Maedhros flinches away from neither the spider guts nor Morgoth’s words, but only pushes off the floor with his bound hands and staggers to his feet. 

Morgoth does not understand. Maedhros’s regrets are all in the past, because the future holds nothing.

The boy stands, broken but determined.

_-_

_You freeze in your foul lightless cell, because Murphy strips you of the clothes Morgoth bestowed upon you, and you shiver without Galway’s blanket in your cell for hours or days, because Bauglir would not leave you with even that. _

_You made him angry, you must have._

_Shortly before the awaited time comes, when your gambling will be paid off in full, Morgoth visits you and says one thing only._

_“He will not be gentle with you, Maitimo, and I will not protect you any longer.”_

_You clench your hands and teeth, and do not betray your hollow relief. You do not remember the dream anymore, of mother and home and snow. _

_You are ready._


End file.
